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Ranger retires after three decades

The Washington Post
Published 3:20 p.m. ET Jan. 3, 2015

Martin Gallery, 70, takes a seat at Ferry Hill Plantation . Gallery is retiring after 36 years of service as a park ranger patrolling the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal National Historic Park.(Photo: Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)

HAGERSTOWN, Md. – Martin Gallery took off his gold badge and put it on the table alongside his pistols, computer and collapsible night stick.

He had already brought the rifle and shotgun from his patrol car, where you can still see the trace of the “K-9” symbol he removed from the rear bumper after his dog died in March.

Gallery, 70, and Samson had been together eight years. And the dog’s death was one of the things that brought the National Park Service lead ranger to local headquarters here Wednesday to close out a career of more than three decades.

Saturday was officially the last day for Gallery, who said he is retiring as the Park Service’s eldest and longest-serving current law enforcement ranger. He has been stationed at the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal National Historical Park for 36 years.

He has patrolled the 184.5 miles of the park, which follows the route of the old canal along the Potomac River, from Cumberland to Washington’s Georgetown neighborhood.

His beat has included places such as Pigmans Ferry and Devils Alley, near Cumberland, Calico Rocks, near Brunswick, and the Billy Goat Trail and Bear Island, near Potomac.

He’s chased poachers, been shot at by a squirrel hunter, and been assaulted by drunken fishermen and campers. He’s handled drownings in the river — 18 in one year alone in Washington County — and shot rabid animals.

He once worked a homicide, a weird case near Hancock, in which a woman had been forced into the river by an assailant and drowned.

“She was in like a flowing negligee,” he said. “We found her floating in some debris. . . . We tried to work on her, but you could see she was pretty much gone. Probably an hour and a half she’d been in the water.”

And for the most part he’s worked by himself, accompanied in recent years by his dog — dashing along the interstates or back roads to reach remote spots on the twisting length of the park, ready for anything.

He carried four firearms, a Taser, a gas mask, a riot helmet, a hazmat suit, a medic’s bag, a camera, mace, a flashlight, handcuffs, a defibrillator and a cellphone.

“We work alone,” he said, “but that’s how the career goes. . . . You’d get a call at night for a campground disturbance and you go in and they’re raising hell and there’s a keg of beer and everybody’s drunk and you’re the only officer there.”

But over three decades, he never fired a gun at anybody. “I had it out a lot, with the poachers, but never had to do that in all my career,” he said.

The dog was a godsend. “He was a 133-pound bomb dog, and he was no-nonsense,” Gallery said.

“Sammy,” as Gallery called the black Lab, was a protector, partner and companion.

He’s still not over the dog’s death last year from leukemia, and he teared up when he spoke of the animal. “When you get into a vehicle with him, 10 hours a day . . . it’s hard. He just becomes such a fixture to you.”

He’d hoped they could retire together.

Gallery, who lives in Scrabble, West Virginia, between two big loops in the Potomac, north of Harpers Ferry, paused Wednesday, his last working day, in the park’s historic Ferry Hill mansion to reflect on his career.

A lean, amiable man with a gray mustache, he said he is the son of a U.S. Coast Guard customs officer and a native of Gloucester, Massachusetts. He served in the U.S. Merchant Marine and in 1966 was married and living in Glen Burnie, when he was drafted for the Vietnam War.

He went to Vietnam in 1968, shortly after the first of his three children was born, and survived several bloody firefights that left him with four wounds and a shattered right wrist that he hasn’t been able to flex since. (He still has the bullet that did the damage.)

In that fight, he was nearly killed when an enemy soldier spotted him wounded on the ground and fired a pistol at his head but missed. He spent more than a month in a hospital in Vietnam, underwent 15 major operations back home and was seven years in the healing process.

He said he joined the Park Service in 1978 and, despite his gimpy wrist, became a commissioned law enforcement ranger the next year.

He has had VIP assignments at the Camp David presidential retreat and at presidential inaugurations.

He’s been shot at twice — once when someone, perhaps a hunter on the West Virginia side of the river, fired a shotgun blast that went tearing through the trees on the Maryland shore, where the park is.

When Gallery yelled at the unseen shooter, “You got people over here!” another blast was fired, peppering his car with buckshot. The shooter was never found.

The second incident involved the squirrel hunter. Gallery was in a dress uniform with shined shoes that day when he got a call about the hunter firing and frightening people in the park near Round Top Mountain, just north of Hancock.

Hunting is not permitted in the park.

When Gallery arrived, the hunter was still at it. Gallery was following him on foot when the hunter spotted him and took off.